Clonal complexes of Staphylococcus aureus: all mixed and together

Abstract

In this manuscript, we show that the most important clonal complexes of Staphylococcus aureus, CC1, CC5, CC8, CC15 and CC97, are now all connected by EBURST when run on the Multi-locus sequence typing (MLST) database. The seven loci suggested for the MLST scheme of S. aureus are not enough to separate the most important clones such as New York/Japan and Brazilian Epidemic Clone (BEC). They now all belong to the same clonal complex and this may be the time to think about a new way to discriminate them.